Twyla Tharp Season With a Cast of Three Companies

<First published online in the New York Times, November 2007>

BERKELEY, Calif., Oct. 29 — A farming friend of my family’s once cut out a piece I had written in a newspaper and sent it to my father with a letter saying, “I don’t know who this Twyla Tharp is, or whether she rides horses or breeds dogs.” Even he, though, could tell that Ms. Tharp mattered to the dance world.

Just now, she matters in particular to audiences in the San Francisco Bay Area. The enterprising Zellerbach Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, is presenting a season in which three of America’s foremost companies — the Joffrey Ballet (Oct. 4 to 6), Miami City Ballet (Oct. 26 to 28) and American Ballet Theater (Nov. 7 to 11) are visiting, each presenting programs of post-1950 choreography, and each showing one or more works by Ms. Tharp. Berkeley’s season has also included lectures and films about Ms. Tharp.

This multi-company attention to the work of one living choreographer is something that happens too rarely anywhere. In the case of Ms. Tharp, it matters more because there has been no permanent company dedicated to her work since 1989. Twyla Tharp Dance, as I watched it from 1980 to 1983, made an impression so intense that I continue to mourn it. A good many of the works she created for it from 1970 on were classics, and they bloomed the more when performed by Tharp specialists.

But I congratulate dance companies that have picked up some of them. Miami City Ballet, which will present a Tharp world premiere next spring, has just danced “Nine Sinatra Songs” and “In the Upper Room” in Berkeley. “In the Upper Room” is well known around the world. (This year alone, London audiences have seen it danced by American Ballet Theater and the Bolshoi.) But when did you last see Ms. Tharp’s classic “Nine Sinatra Songs”? My own answer makes me feel like the oldest person in the room: not since the old Tharp company danced it in 1983.

Until Sunday, that is. Now that television has made ballroom dancing look more fun than it did in the 1980s, Ms. Tharp’s way of setting these nine Sinatra songs as ballroom duets, for one couple after another, seems yet more canny and delicious. It was always supremely expressive: I was thrilled again, for example, to see those sharp turns of the head in “Strangers in the Night,” where tango style sums up both the intimacy and the distance between man and woman. (As his head flicks to look at her, hers flicks to look away.)

Miami City Ballet took on “Nine Sinatra Songs” in 2004. (Though there are some differences between Haydee Morales’s gowns and Oscar de la Renta’s originals, the basic glamour remains.) The original Tharp dancers, an amazing troupe, registered more powerfully as actors than Miami City Ballet’s do, but this version still manages to make each dancer into a character in a very specific emotional instant.

I missed only the most daring moment of the original “That’s Life” duet, when the man had no sooner broken away and put on his dinner jacket than his partner, rushing across the stage in a charge of despair, leapt at his back, swung herself around his neck and arrived across his body. Probably for injury-avoidance reasons, the Miami version is less audacious here.

The Miami dancers drew me deeply into Ms. Tharp’s response to the music: The astonishing detail of footwork for incidental quickstep, Latin or other rhythms; the exhilarating legato glide of the ultralong phrases; the instances of dance eloquence when individual words are cues for dance drama.

In the song that goes “And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like ‘I love you,’ ” there’s one gauche moment when you laugh at the couple’s stupidity; another when the “love” looks helpless and heart-catching. A superlative work, in which Ms. Tharp celebrated individuals more memorably than she surely ever has since, and still sensational.

Can a masterpiece also be repellent? Watching “In the Upper Room,” I’m inclined to think so. The Miami dancers did much by way of pointing up the rhythmic contrast of the detail in this 1986 Tharp ballet: Theirs was a sharp, bright account. Successfully designed as a knockout work to the gathering crescendo of Philip Glass’s commissioned score and brilliantly combining and/or alternating ballet and modern dance, it shows you how well Ms. Tharp knew to build excitement, to create contrast, to cause surprise. I admire and loathe it in the same thought; I find it an intensely manipulative exercise; distinguished by beguiling detail; annihilating; a fascinating construction; tedious.

It is spiritually light years away from George Balanchine’s “Agon,” the program’s centerpiece. The ballerina Suzanne Farrell staged “Agon” for Miami in 1995; the company’s artistic director, Edward Villella, has experience with this ballet going back even further than hers. Certainly the work is in good shape, though it is a shock to hear it performed to taped music. (“Nine Sinatra Songs” was always played to taped music, and “In the Upper Room” is seldom played with live orchestra anymore.) The dancers of Miami City Ballet, without being world class in terms of physical or technical glory, are wonderfully distinct, leading you to notice tiny inflections on specific beats with new clarity.

This kind of startling moment-by-moment clarity is part of what “Agon” is about. It is full of contrasts: ballet steps and pedestrian movement, upward stretches and downward slumps, long-term historical consciousness and now-or-nothing modernity. Danced on this Miami program between two young Tharp works, it still looked and sounded the most “difficult” work on the program: as it should.

@New York Times, 2007